Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law
Metadata
Show full item recordEditorial
Wiley-Blackwell Publishing
Materia
Concepts Experimental jurisprudence Human universals Lon Fuller Modality Natural law
Date
2021-08-11Referencia bibliográfica
Hannikainen, I.R... [et al.] (2021), Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law. Cognitive Science, 45: e13024. [https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13024]
Abstract
Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued
that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In
the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries.
Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054)
were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered
prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are
such laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept
of law which defy people’s grasp of how legal systems function in practice.